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Blog moved to MiniBlog

My most recent blogging platform was WordPress hosted on Azure. This
has worked well for me, but there were a number of issues using this
platform.

I do not like know PHP. This made it very hard to make
customisations. I could usually work out what files to change, but
it was cumbersome.

I found the whole platform to be a little big and clunky for
my needs.

Enter MiniBlog by Mads Kristensen… See what Mads has to say about
MiniBlog on the Github
page:

7 years have passed since I started the
BlogEngine.NET project. It was using
cutting edge technology for its time and quickly became the most
popular blogging platform using ASP.NET.

The MiniBlog was born as a test to see what a modern blog engine could
look like today with the latest ASP.NET and HTML 5 technologies. Just
like with BlogEngine.NET, the goal was to see how small and simple
such a blog engine could be.

This is the result.

Migration from WordPress

Mads has also very helpfully supplied a tool to help with the transfer
of blogs into MiniBlog, MiniBlogFormatter.
It is rough and ready, but currently supports BlogEngine.Net, DasBlog
and WordPress.

Permalink mapping

One of the biggest issues to overcome was regarding links to my previous
blog. I did not want to lose these. Fortunately, Colin from http://www.colinsalmcorner.com/ had already come up with a solution
for this. You can read more about it there. However, I did have a
remaining issue. Colin had setup his OldPostHandler.ashx to point to
*.htm files. My posts did not have an extension and were only pointing
to directories. For example: www.gregpakes.co.uk/2013/11/my-dell-xps-15-2013-review/

I managed to get around this problem by adding a new rewrite rule to the
existing rules in the web.config.

The rewrite rule simply looks for URLs in the format /XXXX/XX/Title/
where X is a number. I chose this format as this is the format all my
posts had. I do not know if this is standard for WordPress, but it was
for me.